Direction, Scenography and Dramaturgy by Trevor Schwellnus
An Aluna Theatre Production at the Theatre Centre
March 13-27, 2011

            On a wide screen, a moving finger draws crosses on what appear to be cemetery tablets. Later, as this screen is washed in blue, virtually naked bodies seem to float in some unknown river. Enlarged shadows of human figures engage in slow interaction on the same screen, sometimes metamorphosing into a large multi-legged insect. Then two females in white robes emerge from behind the screen and, lit candle-lamps in hand, develop a ritual of mourning remembrance. Beatriz Pizano (Artistic Director of Aluna Theatre) enters into the ritual by recounting her discovery of a severed hand belonging to an endearingly eccentric cook who would forget to add chicken to his chicken soup. Radio voices crackle indistinctly, and charts on the screen suggest the real subject of this sixty-minute multimedia dance-theatre piece. Originally a design experiment by scenographer Trevor Schwellnus in the use of live video in stage performance, Nohayquiensepa has obviously grown from a Toronto Summerworks feature and Harbourfront Centre HATCH project into a full production with many outstanding elements.

            Inspired by events in a Colombian river town on the edge of great violence, much occasioned by the presence and activities of Canadian mining conglomerates, this piece has a political and moral conscience. Subtitled “A Requiem for the Forcibly Displaced,” it creates moving tapestries that segue from one episode to another, and each episode, backed by a tense soundscape, reinforces the morbid shock of murder victims and the practised cover-ups by conglomerate authorities. There is some strong dancing by the ensemble, but especially by Lilla Leon and Victoria Mata, and Carlos Gonzalez-Vio has dramatic presence. However, like many a multi-media project, this one is betrayed by its spoken text. Because the voices are often deliberately garbled and even when they aren’t, they are fragmented, the back-story is never clearly stated and the characters in it remain shadowy at best.

Schwellnus and his artistic collaborators (who include choreographer Olga Barrios, costume designer Andjelja Djuric, sound composer Thomas Ryder Payne, assistant director Heather Braaten, video artist Lorena Torres Loalza who does the live drawings, and six dancers from Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Serbia, and Canada) deserve high marks for the visual imagery, but I wish that this project had used a real writer to shape the documentary materials and carry them into a zone of moving prose-poetry. As it is, the victims and their terrorizers/abusers/murderers remain frustratingly undeveloped. As a result, the heartbeat of the show is not as strong as it could be.

pic 1: Image courtesy of DW Communications

pic 2: Chris Stanton, Carlos Gonzalez-Vio, Mahayuel Tecozautla, and Beatriz Pizano in "Nohayquiensepa" (photo: Katherine Fleitas, Aluna Fleitas)




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